Faust And Marguerite In The Garden

Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 217 x 134 cm (85.4 x 52.8 in)
Signed: Signed and dated (l.r.): Ary Scheffer 1846

Provenance: Munich, Frieherr von Lotzbeck, acquired from thje artist in 1846 and held by his heirs until after 1927; by inheritance to Bavaria, Private Collection, until 1990; New York, Private Collection.

Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1846 (possibly); New Orleans Museum of Art, New York Stair Sainty Matthiesen, Cincinnati Taft Museum of Art, Romance and Chivalry: Literature and History reflected in early nineteenth century painting, June 1996 – February 1997, No. 52.

Ary Scheffer (Dordrecht 1795 Argenteuil near Paris 1858) received his first lessons in art from his parents Cornelia Lamme and Johann Bernhard Scheffer, both of whom were painters. From 1806 to 1809 he studied at the Academy of Drawing in Amsterdam. In 1808, still only thirteen, he had his first success, exhibiting a picture whose theme was taken from Roman history, painted in a fairly monochrome, Rembrandtesque palette. After his father's death in 1809 his mother took the boy to Paris, where he became a pupil of the neoclassical painter Guérin in 1811.

During the Bourbon restoration monarchy (I814/15 1830) Scheffer took an increasingly active part in politics. A supporter of liberal reform, he was a fierce opponent of the conservative Bourbon regime. He was on friendly terms with General La Fayette, a leading opposition figure, and was involved in the Carbonari plots to overthrow the government. The Greek independence movement excited his imagination and he produced six works inspired by their struggle against the Turks. Of these the Souliot Women (Salon of 1827, where it was purchased by the Nation) and the Greek Women Imploring the Virgin for Assistance are two of the most notable.

Having established as a reputation as both a genre and history painter and as a successful portraitist, he became one of the leaders of the Romantic movement. Scheffer had been drawing master to the Duke of Orléans’ children since 1822 and was on friendly terms with the family (painting numerous portraits of them). Following the July revolution of 1830 the Duke of Orléans became King of the French as Louis Philippe I, further securing the artist’s position. Scheffer is best remembered for his Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, an icon of nineteenth century painting, and his series of paintings of the life of Marguerite from Goethe’s Faust.

Théophile Gautier described Scheffer as “a transposed poet; Dante, Goethe and Byron were more his masters than Michelangelo, Raphael or Titian.” He became particularly well-known as a painter of Goethe’s Faust, a contemporary drama with roots in a sixteenth-century story. Scheffer’s interest in the Faust story can be traced back to 1825, and between 1831 and 1858 he painted eight major compositions with themes from Faust, most of them episodes centering on Marguerite. The Detroit Institute of Art owns a version of the Marguerite Leaving Church painted in 1838 (fig. 94) in which Scheffer has already established the cool Ingresque tonalities, the historical costumes, and the idealized physiognomies that he would maintain in the Marguerite and Faust in the Garden (cat. 52 fig. 95). This was exhibited, along with Faust at the Sabbath, in the 1846 Salon (the last to which Scheffer sent works).

The subject of Faust and Marguerite (Gretchen) in the garden of her neighbor Martha who looks on with Mephistopheles comes from Part One of Goethe’s Faust. The exquisitely painted Marguerite, beautiful and innocent, has a finely modeled torso, exuding a sinuous sensuality of which she appears unaware. Faust, determined to seduce her and transformed by Mephistopheles' magic into a handsome youth, places his head close to her while bringing about her seduction and ultimate ruin. He says:
No sighs or trembling! Look in my eyes,
And let them, let this handclasp say to you
Things beyond human speech.
Ah love, wholly to yield one’s self, to know
Deep bliss that has no ending.
Marked for eternity, so deep,
This cannot end - unless despair were all!
Nay, there’s no ending then.

Only the mocking face of Mephistopheles in the shadows may portend the tragic conclusion of this love affair.

The picture exhibited here is the most important extant version of this composition. Whether it is, in fact, the work that was sent to the 1846 Salon cannot be ascertained on the basis of published information, but there are, in any event, strong indications that this was the artist’s first version. It is dated 1846 and, more significantly, there are pentiments visible (around the head of Faust and at the bottom of his cloak) which indicate subtle compositional changes that the artist was much more likely to have made in initially working out the composition than in painting replicas. Such changes are consistent with the artist’s remarkable attention to the expressive nuances of pose evident throughout the painting, as, for example, in the juxtaposition of Faust and Marguerite’s hands or in the parallel lines of Faust’s extended leg and the long fold in Marguerite’s skirt.

When Scheffer exhibited at the 1846 Salon after an hiatus of six years the public eagerly awaited his entries. The two Faust paintings were purchased immediately from the Salon by the dealer and bronze foundry master, Susse. The critical reaction to Scheffer’s reappearance was mixed. Baudelaire, who had previously praised Scheffer, was particularly harsh and made Scheffer the focus of a section in his Salon review entitled “On M. Ary Scheffer and the Apes of Sentiment.” His criticisms, however, focused on another of Scheffer’s seven Salon entries for that year; the Faust and Marguerite was not mentioned. Théophile Thoré, on the other hand, consistently championed Scheffer and devoted several adoring pages to this painting. He wrote that Scheffer was “endowed with a comprehensive intelligence and a rare sensibility ... His turn of mind is above all metaphysical, like the genius of men of the North ... He has found in Goethe a mood sympathetic to his own genius. No one has better translated the German poetry, which is a bit French and revolutionary, especially in Goethe ... His Marguerite is form and beauty. What good are the riches of the spirit, if they do not shine in striking and luminous images.” He described Marguerite’s figure as supple and round and imprisoned in a white bodice. He notes that she is still the “German Virgin” that Scheffer had painted in his earlier Marguerite Leaving Church, a fact that the artist himself suggests by the sliver of a church building visible in the background of this painting. But the figure of Marguerite also calls to mind the Madonnas of Raphael, and in this melding of northern and southern Renaissance traditions Scheffer comes very close to the work of the German Nazarenes and to Ingres, whom he so admired, and anticipates the British Pre-Raphaelite movement of